Cross Catholic Outreach has blessed poor children and families since 2001. Read thank-you messages from people in Guatemala, Haiti and Kenya who have received food, housing, education and more.
Families living in developing countries around the world often live in crumbling mud and stick shacks or huts pieced together from scraps found at the local garbage dump.
Voices and bongo drums resound in worship at the Kobonal Haiti Mission. A band and choir set a celebratory atmosphere for the hundreds of poor, rural Haitians gathered at this simple open-air pavilion for Father Glenn Meaux’s Mass.
I was apprehensive about tagging along with the Cap-Haitien Prison Ministry in Haiti. I had heard stories about prisons in developing countries, but I had never seen one for myself.
Thomas Aquinas was the youngest of nine children born to noble parents in the Kingdom of Sicily. Following the tradition of the times, five-year-old Thomas was sent to the Abbey of Monte Cassino to train among Benedictine monks.
When I was preparing to take my first trip as a Cross Catholic staff writer, I expected to encounter poverty in developing nations. I did not immediately consider the joy that I would find thriving, even in the most challenging regions of the earth.